Currently, stand alone passive, infra-red search and track (IRST) systems are used for infrared tracking of a target. Passive IR sensing by itself does not provide a complete picture of the battlespace. An IRST sensor does not obtain accurate range and range rates without special maneuvers by a single aircraft or multi-lateration by two or more aircraft. In addition, targets at long range are unresolved providing little information for characterization. Also, clutter and other phenomenology present tracking challenges. Finally, to detect at long ranges, an IRST must relax False Alarm (FA) thresholds without a highly responsive means of target/FA verification.
It should be noted that modern wide-area IR sensing systems go through a temporal processing sequence to isolate FA sources, such as clutter, in order to build its watch, track, and declare lists. This does not mean that false alarms do not reach the latter two lists. At this point, a modern IRST system that has a single-target-track (STT) mode could switch into this mode to confirm that a suspicious declared target is, indeed, real. This, however, means that the operator must notice something is “not quite right” with a declared track, decide to switch the mode to STT, wait for the scan of the volume to perform target/FA scans, and switch back to track-while-scan (TWS) surveillance. Meanwhile, this commanded mode switch has pulled the IR sensing system away from providing wide-area TWS situational awareness for the duration. As such, there is a need for improved infra-red sensing abilities.